1. Introduction: The Mirror on the Scooter
Have you ever sat behind someone on a scooter and looked into the small round mirror sticking out near the handle? The whole road behind you fits inside that tiny mirror. Cars, people, a dog, the shop — all squeezed in, all small, all the right way up.
Now turn the back of a steel spoon toward your face. The bulged-out side. Your face is small, upright, and stays upright however you move the spoon.
That scooter mirror and the back of the spoon are the same kind of mirror — a convex mirror. A convex mirror is a curved mirror whose reflecting surface bulges outward, toward you.
Stop scrolling. Try it in your head before reading on: why does that little scooter mirror fit so much road into so little glass?
In the last lessons you learned the parts of a spherical mirror and how a concave mirror forms images. This lesson is about the other mirror — the convex one. The good news: a convex mirror has only one story to tell. No matter where you put the object, the image always behaves the same way. Once you can draw it once, you can draw it always. Your whole job here is to draw that one story correctly and read what it tells you.